Sales & CRM

How to clean up stale deals in your pipeline as Small Investor Relations Teams

Sales & CRMFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Your investor CRM is a shared HubSpot nobody agreed to configure, a Notion database your CFO keeps editing, and a spreadsheet that lives in three versions across two inboxes. Stale deals sit in your pipeline for quarters because nobody has time to systematically review them — you're busy producing LP letters and fielding capital call questions. At your last quarterly review, you discovered six institutional prospects that hadn't been touched in five months: two had closed rounds with competitors, one had written off the asset class entirely. A two-person IR team can't afford that kind of pipeline rot, but you also can't afford a dedicated CRM admin or the $50k+ institutional stack that assumes one exists.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Sales & CRMFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live investor CRM that surfaces every deal or prospect contact untouched for more than 30 days, with the last email thread pulled in automatically from Gmail or Outlook

A weekly digest that flags stale LP and institutional prospect relationships by tier, showing days since last contact, open commitments, and the next ask — delivered to your inbox every Monday

A triage workflow that drafts follow-up emails for stale contacts in your voice, so re-engagement takes 10 minutes per week instead of a full afternoon

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Email Agent Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule so email thread history populates CRM contacts automatically. Connect HubSpot or Capsule CRM from Starch's integration catalog (the agent queries it live) if you want to import an existing contact list. Starch also syncs your Google Calendar data on a schedule to cross-reference meeting history against last-contact dates. If your LP portal or DocSend data room is web-accessible, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me an investor CRM with pipeline stages: Prospecting, First Meeting, DD in Progress, Soft Circle, Committed, Closed, Passed. Fields per contact: firm name, LP type (family office / institutional / fund of funds), commitment size, last contact date, last email summary, next action, and assigned owner. Flag any contact where last contact date is more than 30 days ago.

Every Monday at 8am, pull all CRM contacts where last contact date is older than 30 days, group them by LP tier, and send me a Slack summary with: contact name, firm, days stale, last interaction summary, and a suggested next step.

For each stale contact flagged this week, draft a re-engagement email from my Gmail account that references our last conversation and proposes a 20-minute call. Queue them for my review before sending.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Start with the CRM app from the Starch App Store. Tell Starch your exact pipeline stages and the fields that matter to IR — LP type, commitment size, soft circle date, and next ask — rather than accepting a generic sales CRM layout.

2 Connect Gmail or Outlook as a scheduled-sync provider so Starch pulls in email thread history and surfaces the last message date for every investor contact automatically.

3 Import your existing contact list. If it's in HubSpot or Capsule CRM, connect either from Starch's integration catalog and run: 'Import all contacts from HubSpot, map deal stage to our IR pipeline stages, and flag anyone with no activity in the last 60 days.'

4 Define 'stale' for your team. For institutional LPs you might set the threshold at 45 days; for warm family office prospects, 21 days. Tell Starch: 'Flag any LP-type contact untouched for more than 30 days, any institutional prospect untouched for more than 45 days, and surface them in a Stale Deals view sorted by days since last contact.'

5 Add the Email Triage app and connect it to the same Gmail or Outlook sync. Configure it to recognize investor-related threads — you can say: 'Treat any email from a domain in my CRM as high-priority. Summarize long LP threads in one sentence and attach the summary to that contact's CRM record.'

6 Build the weekly stale-deal digest automation: 'Every Monday at 8am, query my CRM for contacts where last contact date is more than 30 days ago. Group results by LP tier. Send me a Slack message listing each contact with days stale, their commitment status, and a suggested next step.'

7 Layer in draft re-engagement emails via the Email Triage app: 'For each stale contact in this week's digest, draft a re-engagement email that references the last email thread subject line and proposes a 20-minute update call. Put all drafts in my Gmail drafts folder for review before I send.'

8 Use the Task Manager app to convert high-priority stale contacts into tracked action items: 'Create a P1 task for every contact who is soft-circled but hasn't been touched in 30 days. Set a due date of this Friday and assign it to me.'

9 Set a monthly cleanup automation: 'On the first of each month, find all CRM contacts marked Passed or Closed more than 90 days ago with no follow-up activity, and move them to an Archived stage so they stop appearing in active pipeline views.'

10 Run a pipeline health check before each LP quarterly call: 'Give me a summary of all contacts in the DD in Progress and Soft Circle stages, sorted by last contact date. Highlight anyone we haven't spoken to since before the last quarter-end.'

11 If your LP data room lives in DocSend or Intralinks, Starch automates access checks through your browser — no API needed — so you can cross-reference which LPs have viewed materials recently against your stale contact list.

12 Publish the clean pipeline view to your CFO or GP as a read-only dashboard so they stop editing your Notion database: 'Build a dashboard showing active pipeline by stage, total soft-circled capital, and contacts flagged stale this week. Make it viewable without editing rights.'

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Q1 2026 IR Pipeline Cleanup — March Review

Sample numbers from a real run

Stale contacts surfaced (30+ days no touch)	14
Soft-circled capital at risk (untouched 45+ days)	8,200,000
Re-engagement emails drafted by Starch	14
Emails sent after review (same afternoon)	11
Meetings booked within 10 days	4
Time spent on full cleanup cycle	90

Going into your March quarterly LP update, you run the stale-deal digest for the first time on your imported HubSpot contact list. Starch surfaces 14 contacts untouched for more than 30 days. Three are in the Soft Circle stage representing $8.2M in potential commitments — none of them had been contacted since before the December holidays. The Email Triage app pulls the last thread for each contact, summarizes it in a sentence, and drafts a re-engagement email referencing the specific fund terms you'd discussed. You review all 14 drafts in about 40 minutes, send 11, and archive three that had already committed elsewhere (information you found in your own inbox that had never made it into the CRM). Within 10 days, four meetings are booked. The $8.2M exposure drops to $3.1M still at risk — and you know exactly who those three contacts are and what the next step is. The whole cleanup cycle took 90 minutes of your time instead of a full day of digging through email threads.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days since last LP contact, segmented by commitment stage (Soft Circle, DD in Progress)

Percentage of active pipeline contacts touched in the last 30 days

Total soft-circled capital with no contact in 45+ days

Re-engagement email response rate by LP tier (family office vs. institutional)

Time from stale-deal flag to next meeting booked

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

HubSpot CRM

Powerful but requires a paid admin seat to configure IR-specific fields and stages; out of the box it's built for quota-carrying sales teams, not two-person LP relationship management.

Juniper Square / Addepar

Purpose-built for fund IR and LP reporting, but starts at $50k+/year and assumes a dedicated IR-ops analyst — overkill if you need a stale-deal view, not a full fund administration platform.

Notion CRM template

Free and flexible, but your CFO keeps editing it, there's no email sync, and 'who haven't we spoken to in 30 days' requires a manual filter every time.

Salesforce

Enterprise-grade and deeply configurable, but the configuration cost alone — admin hours plus the license — is hard to justify for a two-person IR team that needs one clean pipeline view.

Spreadsheet (Excel / Google Sheets)

You know exactly why you're reading this page.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, email agent, task manager all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We already have contacts in HubSpot. Do we have to start from scratch?

No. Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live — and tell Starch to import your existing contacts into the IR CRM with your preferred field mapping. You can run: 'Import all HubSpot contacts, map Deal Stage to our IR pipeline stages, and flag anyone with no email activity in the last 60 days.' Your history comes with you.

Will Starch actually read our email threads to populate last-contact dates, or does someone have to update the CRM manually?

Starch syncs your Gmail or Outlook data on a schedule, so last-contact dates and thread summaries populate automatically. You don't update anything manually. The CRM reads from your inbox, not the other way around.

Our LP list lives in DocSend and a shared Notion database. Can Starch pull from both?

Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule, so pages and databases come in directly. For DocSend, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed — so you can pull data room access logs or viewer activity without waiting for a DocSend API integration.

Is this SOC 2 certified? We have LPs who will ask.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's the honest answer, and it's worth knowing before you route sensitive LP PII through any new system. Starch does not store raw email content beyond what's needed to power your apps, but if your fund's compliance policy requires SOC 2 Type II, flag that conversation before you build.

Can two people on the team both see and edit the same pipeline, or is this single-user?

You can build the CRM dashboard to be shared, and both team members can update contact records. The weekly digest can go to both of you. The CFO or GP can get a read-only view that doesn't give them edit access to your pipeline data.

What if our investors are tracked in a system like iLevel or Q4 that isn't in your integration list?

If iLevel or Q4 has a web interface you can log into, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed. You can pull data into your Starch CRM from any web-accessible portal that way. If they have an API, connect it from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps.

Will QuickBooks data sync to show capital account balances next to LP contacts?

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, payments, journal entries, and vendor records sync normally. Note that QuickBooks report views like P&L and Transaction List are temporarily disabled pending a connector fix, but entity-level data is available. You can build a view that links capital account journal entries to individual LP contact records in your CRM.